Christmas Morning

Christmas morning! What excitement for each and every family! Parents and grandparents pour expressions of love into children and one another. Families visit one another, enjoy a festive meal together, take time away from daily toil and struggles for livelihood. For this day, life is as idyllic as we can each make it.

Many families start their day with a reminder of the origin of this greatest festival of our calendar, gathering children together to reflect on Christmas before opening gifts. Some light the center candle in the family advent wreath (having built up to this moment with the lighting of each of the other four candles on the four Sundays leading up to Christmas); some read famliar passages of the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus.  Children might be a little impatient, but they grow up to treasure these moments and will very often maintain these as traditions in their own famlies, anchoring Christmas in its context.
So let us reflect on this context of Christmas. We know that Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus; but furthermore, we are told in the Gospel accounts of the story that this was a most remarkable birth, in that Jesus was born as God appearing in the flesh, as a human being.
Now let's chew on that for a moment.  God didn't show up in the perfect likeness of a human being, as our nativity scenes suggest - a perfect little doll in the manger; no, God showed up in an actual baby, needing to be burped, fed and changed like any baby, growing up with all the bumps and scars from play as any child would have, facing manhood with all the struggles a teen has.
Think about what this means.  We think of God as perfect, and we all know that we are each very imperfect, subject to change, disease, hurt and decay in our physical bodies.  With a huge gulf between God and us, where is hope? Where is meaning?
But God came to us humans in Jesus; God took the step to bridge that gulf.  And in coming as Jesus, God celebrated being human as being a beautiful expression of God's creation.  With all our imperfections, God still loves each person, indeed all his creation.  When God created the world, he said it was good; when God created human beings, he called it "very good".  When God came in Jesus, he reaffirmed that each human has a value that we haven't really fully grasped.  Nor can we ever.
Christmas Morning.  God values each and every person, just as they are.  And so should we.